Since the 90s I recall country music being full of cheating on your girl, getting drunk, kicking someone's ass, and so on. Other pop music is more about getting girls in the club or whatever, but country has fairly similar lyrical content.
It is an unfair comparison to modern hip-hop, which is primarily warrior bragodoccio. Go to WorldStar if you want to see.
Here's where it ends up, that's the story and that's the song. There's some bragodoccio in it, both Cash and Gang Starr.
Just to get a Rep is a morality play.
As a matter of fact, I'll start. Here's "Holy Ghost" by Future, one of the most popular artists alive right now:
> Feeling like a cigarette boat, all this water on me
> I was at my big truck, my wrist up, gettin' my dick sucked
> When I switch my wrist up, switch my car, switch my bitch up
> Every time I hit her, I broke her off then dismissed her
> I been counting this paper all day, I'm getting blisters
> Roadkill, every time I pop out in a new whip
> Gettin' you wacked, niggas ain't running off with my new drip
> Rolls hit, lights hit, platinum set, overkill
And here's Cash:
> When I was just a young boy, my mama told me son
> Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns
> But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die
> Now I hear that train a rollin', I hang my head and cry
Wow, so similar. You can really see how they're both speaking the same language overall and have the same effect on society and their listeners.
To be clear, I am sure that you can find nakedly self-indulgent and violent country music if you look hard for it. But you won't find it on the top of the country charts. You don't have to look hard at all to find outrageously vulgar, explicit, and criminal hip-hop. People need to stop pretending that Folsom Prison Blues holds the same place in culture that "Holy Ghost" and its ilk does because it tells the story of a man who shot someone.
What's your problem with that lyric?
I’d hope country fans also wouldn’t want their genre being judged solely by what’s being churned on the radio.
My main point is that the equivocation of Folsom Prison Blues with violent popular hip-hop today is ridiculous. If someone wants to compare it to Dance With the Devil or or The Story of OJ or Just to Get a Rep, that's fine, but that's not the context that people usually bring up FPB in. Violence and criminality in country music very rarely touches the rhapsodic and elevated status it achieves every week in popular hip-hop, and to pretend it does so often and that they're perfectly comparable is disingenuous.
Comparing certified classics of any genre from half a century ago to slop churned out today, ignoring the fact most of it will be forgotten and new classics will rise up, is weird.
This ridiculous equivalence between popular country and popular hip-hop should end. The two genres are made for entirely different social classes of people for entirely different reasons. The number of popular songs unironically glorifying violence in hip-hop is much, much higher than the number of songs unironically glorifying violence in country. The original commenter was correct.